The Rainbow - Satanic Inversion and Perversion
I grew-up in wonder of rainbows. From my Irish mother came tales of mischievous, Leprechauns with green coats, hats and promises of money at the rainbow's end. From my Jewish father there were sombre stories of floods and a cleansing of the earth and a promise never to flood the world again.
The hymn during the Eucharist at the vigil Mass on New Year’s Eve was "Soul of My Saviour", based on "Anima Christi", attributed to Pope John XXII in the 14th century. Its words signifying Christ giving Himself for our redemption and remaining with us today, body, blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist.
The opening verse of
the hymn:
Soul of my Saviour, sanctify my breast,
Body of Christ, be Thou my saving
guest,
Blood of my Saviour, bathe
me in Thy tide,
Wash me with water flowing
from Thy side.
On the Feast of the Epiphany, my eyes strayed from the hymn being sung
onto "The Day of Resurrection!", written by St
John of Damascus in the 7th century.. The words from verse two stood
out: "That we may see aright the Lord in rays eternal of
resurrection light,"
Recently I had been looking through images of rainbows searching for a suitable picture for this blog and reading up on the
science behind their formation. Seeing the fantastical image of the "Glory
Rainbow", featured above, and calling to mind the image of the
consecrated bread and wine being held aloft by the priest, it occurred to
me that the rainbow is a prefiguring of the Eucharist sacrifice - God's way of
redeeming man rather than destroying His creation. Here the rays reflect blood
and water.
This chap, Treehugger, (yes, yes, I know) explains the physics of
rainbows. A rainbow
is a band of colours formed by the reflection and refraction of the sun’s rays
inside raindrops. It's colours are composed of an infinite range of hues, some
the human eye cannot see. And different people see different colours. Rainbows
can appear as multiples of colours, or even without a range colour. Some are simply red. Its traditional semicircle shape comes from our perspective seeing the
horizon, giving it the appearance of a half-circle. When the correct
atmospheric conditions exist and they are observed from above, the rainbow
becomes a full circle - known as the "The Glory Rainbow".
After the Flood, the
sun shone within and through the rain. God showed His love for mankind
through the very means used to destroy the majority of us. There was a rebirth
for creation and a promise: God would never destroy the earth again by water. He'd
leave that to us! Instead, He would condescend become a man, join His creation, sacrifice Himself and
prepare an Ark for us, His Church.
The Hebrew term bĕriyth for "covenant" is from a root with the sense of "cutting" because covenants were made by the cut pieces of flesh of an animal sacrifice. In the Noahic covenant, God promises never again to destroy all life on earth by flood and creates the rainbow as the sign of this "everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth". Noah and the generations of his posterity were required in their turn to procreate and follow the 'Seven Laws of Noah'. These included prohibitions against worshipping idols, cursing God, murder, adultery and sexual immorality, theft, eating flesh torn from a living animal, and an obligation to establish courts of justice.
Today this majestic manifestation of God's love and His promise, the foreshadowing of His incarnation and self-sacrifice, has been inverted; perverted into a symbol of rebellion against God. A diabolical misrepresentation signifying man's rebellion and intention to let passions and desires run free. Instead of infinite Love and Mercy, some see it as standing for license to engage in infinite moral disorder.
So what's an apple got to do with it?
My mother spoke of right and wrong and
doing as one is told - being obedient and following the rules. Christ was
brutalised because of one bite from an apple?! Really?! What
kind of vengeful God is this? An echo of Jansenism, a Catholic variant of
Calvinism imported from France, lingered on in Ireland long after it had
been anathematised. It
made God a fearful, arbitrary deity who demanded
utter obedience. There are echoes of paganism here too - the need to satisfy and
pacify an angry god.
My father, raised an Orthodox Jew,
stepped in. He explained, in ways a child could understand, that God loved our
first parents and made eternal life with Him available to them in Paradise if
they trusted and honoured Him. There was one stipulation - not to eat the fruit
of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating this fruit dishonoured God;
it showed a lack of trust in Him. The natural grace Adam and Eve had received, enabling them to follow God and keep their bodily desires in check, left them.
They lost their innocence. It wasn't about a bite from an apple; it was
about our relationship with our Creator. Perhaps, my father added, the maturity
of man as beings with free will necessitated this test and temptation. Our first parents failed. At the
time, I understood my mother's explanation more than my father's, but his
seemed more reasonable as I grew older. Still, it was just a bite from an
apple! What on earth could have possessed them to give up so much for a fleeting
pleasure?
Enter Satan, the 'Father of Lies',
using text book emotional and psychological manipulation, playing on a person's
weaknesses and using deception to exploit these. He succeeded with Adam and Eve and,
like a cancer, his lies continue spreading through society, among His people and in
the churches.
Tennyson once said, “A lie
that is all of a lie can be met with and fought outright. But a lie that is
partly the truth is a harder matter to fight.”
Satan asks, “If God really loved
you, He wouldn’t keep something from you, would He?” He undermines
God’s Word and God’s warning, suggesting to Eve, “You will not surely die.” It's
a short step from questioning God’s Word to denying it. Eve listened to Satan's
questions and fell into his trap. He substituted his lie for God's truth
and told Eve that if she ate from the tree, she “will be like God,
knowing good and evil.”
Eve saw that the tree “was pleasant to the eyes.” Another opening for demonic temptation - people entertain fantasies in their mind, dwell on them and convince themselves there's really no harm in acting on them, Eve saw that the tree “was good for food” and gratified her desires. Eve understood that the tree was “desirable to make one wise”, and pride did the rest. Satan reframed Eve's perception of good and evil initially through her mind, then caused her to act through her desires. By encouraging her to see the forbidden fruit differently and eat it, he corrupted her relationship with God. Adam's mind had been prepared by God for such an attack, yet he stood by, let Eve be seduced and then ate the fruit himself. He had walked with God and been given responsibility for the Garden and Eve was to be his helpmate. His sin was greater.
The natural infused grace in the souls of Adam and
Eve left and they were spiritually wounded. Their minds and passions were at war with their consciences - God's inner voice.
In disobeying God, they
developed unruly feelings, desires and behaviours. Their sense of right
and wrong fought against their bodily passions. Their 'selves' divided.
It was an act of mercy Adam and Eve were denied access to the Tree of Life.
Imagine living in eternal separation from God with insatiable passions and
desires at war with our sense of right and wrong? Now that would be hell.
Adam and Eve's relationship with
one another was ruptured; so too their relationships with their children; and
their relationship with nature. The integrity between mind, body and soul was
lost. Man is now in this
world with an underlying sense that "something" is amiss, He knows in his
heart the right thing to do; he has a conscience; he has reason. But due to an
absence of grace, he is at war with himself.
In usurping the rainbow as a
symbol of freedom without restraint, and in claiming God permits us to act
how we feel because He made us this way, we usurp God majesty and install
ourselves in His place.
Jesus taught in
analogy and metaphor because it bypasses the mind and its constructs.
It penetrates past our normal ways of thinking and seeing. God's Word, through the psalms and
the divine poetry of Scripture, and the Words of our Saviour, bypass the brain's wiring. Satan and the kingdom of this world, attempts the same. Our language wires our brain from an early age and constructs 'reality'; it forms a
perception of 'self' and and our place in the world. The language of
"wokeism" is used, knowing or unwittingly, by Satan's earthly
emissaries. The same applies to all words that corrupt and distort our relationships with one another and God. Just watch an advert! Listen to the way sex is discussed nowadays and the words used to describe this, the most intimate of human contact.
Dodo wishes you all a belated Happy New Year, invites you to jump through the rainbow and hopes you land on the back of one that will send you soaring to Heaven's door.
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